Love Sonnets
by Pablo Neruda
When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands
To pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind,
I want you to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
To continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
I want what I love to continue to live,
And you whom I love and sang above everything else
To continue to flourish, full-flowered;
So that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
So that everything can learn the reason for my song.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could .
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair.
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there.
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay .
In leaves no step had trodden black .
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Death is Nothing at All
by Canon Henry Scott-Holland
Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped away
into the next room.
I am I, and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
that we are still.
Call me by my old familiar name,
speak to me in the easy way which you
have always used to.
Put no difference in your tone,
wear no forced air of
solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at
the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Let my name be ever the household
word that it always was, let it be spoken
without effect, without a trace of shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was;
there is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you, for an interval somewhere very near,
just around the corner.
All is well. Nothing is past; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
Elegy for Your Absence
by H.R. Hays
In that moment you sailed for all of death,
Into profound oceans of silence
With long hours of sleeping pupils,
And a flock of doves caught in your dreams.
Now you are already in distant moonlight,
More yourself than in the arrows of your golden clock
Where you reckoned such a shoreless moment
For the thirst of wings that was burning on your shoulders.
You shall have vaulted seas stared at by inquietude,
Abysses in the timid solitude of your absence;
And in the night you shall have been delicate warm breeze
Close to that crumb of our amorous earth.
Long embrace of breath over the poppies
And a laugh and a song without words or music;
With a “Here I am,” glad of past wakefulness,
And a “forever” warm in the cool plain.
As you leave pressed in the arms of silence
The light of our words shall echo more clearly
And in each stanza of air an accent shall be entangled
And in each butterfly more wings shall be born to you.
Gladness of being alive for that eternal day,
Knowing yourself in the water, in the sun, and in the grass.
Among the clouds you shall make nativities of silver
And you shall discover your nest in a tree of stars.
